


call it honesty

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-14 00:28:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her sister could still volunteer for her. That’s her first thought when the announcer’s voice rings out, nasal and cruel, across the center square. Jade is eighteen, she’s still eligible, she could do it, she could.  </p><p>Or, Wally West and Artemis Crock are the tributes from District 12.  The odds are probably not in their favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	call it honesty

_Your body is not a word,_   
_it does not lie or_   
_speak truth either._

_It is only  
here or not here. _

\- Margaret Atwood, "We Are Hard On Each Other"  
  
  
  
01.  
  
Her sister could still volunteer for her. That’s her first thought when the announcer’s voice rings out, nasal and cruel, across the center square. Jade is eighteen, she’s still eligible, she could do it, she _could_. Jade won the Hunger Games when she was twelve, but there aren’t any specific rule against past winners volunteering to go again, she could _do it_ , she could just raise her hand and -  
  
When she snaps out of this fantasy she is somehow standing on the platform, transported, and Posion Ivy (stupid, _stupid_ name) is yanking her hand up by the wrist, a ragdoll imitation of excitement and pride. Jade has already disappeared. That’s how Jade won her games - she was invisible and she was pitiless and she never once looked back at the people she left to die so that she could live.  
  
This, in retrospect, is her sister’s first and last lesson to her.  
  
“ _Wallace West!_ ”  
  
The name tears through her like a rabid animal, ripping out chunks of her insides, burrowing its way through her guts. His face won’t come into focus, but she can see the old-penny color of his hair standing out like a smear of blood against the neutral blondes and browns of the other boys. She sees the blood-smear of his head move slowly up to the stage, and this is maybe the first time she’s ever seen him do _anything_ slowly, and for whatever reason hysterical laughter starts to rise up her throat and she claps a hand over her mouth to keep it in until she realizes that it’s _bile_ , that she’s about to throw up, right here, in front of everyone and the cameras. She can’t do this, she thinks frantically, if she’s the girl who vomited in terror at the Reaping she’ll be branded as easy prey and she’ll be dead in an hour in the area, in _minutes_.  
  
Cool fingers curl around her elbow and gently pull her hand from her mouth. The fingers, pale and freckled, slide down her elbow to twine between her own and raise their locked hands in unity. Artemis’s gray-green eyes meet Wally’s bright moss-colored ones and he smiles, wide and stupid and slightly crazed around the eyes.  It makes her forget that she was about to throw up because her stomach has dropped down past her feet into the rust-red dirt of District 12.  
  
No one cheers. But District 12 never does.  
  
She only gets three minutes with her mother instead of five because of how long it takes to get her wheelchair into the building. She falls to her knees and buries her face in her mother’s lap and sobs until the crying is like a separate thing from her, until the sound is like a conjoined twin that’s trying to tear itself away from her. Her mother does nothing but stroke her long blonde hair (hanging loose across her back for once) back from her face and whisper “ _I love you I love you I love you._ ” over and over again. The part of her that is far away from her wrenching body is almost awed at the brutality of it, that the Hunger Games will take both her mother’s daughters from her, one way or another. Either she will lose and she will die and her mother will have to watch it in real time, or she will win and she will fade away like Jade until all that’s left of her is her smile, a spectre that appears every Reaping Day.  
  
“You’re strong,” her mother finally says, voice quiet and urgent as the thud of Peacekeeper boots gets mercilessly closer. “You’re my daughter and I love you and you’re strong. You have to _try_ , Artemis,” she says, neither begging nor commanding, wiping her daughter’s swollen face with her sleeve. “Just try for me. I love you.”  
  
Then she’s gone, the Peacekeeper yanking her wheelchair away with a squeak of protesting metal. She stays on her knees on the floor, suddenly exhausted, when Bette Kane of all people comes into the room and kneels down next to her.  
  
“Listen, I know it’s not much, I want you to have this,” she presses a small pin into Artemis’s calloused hands, a bird caught in flight, clutching an arrow that’s apparently just been shot at it, right next to death and yet safe from harm.  
  
“I wouldn’t have missed,” Artemis mumbles at the bird - a firebird, she guesses vacantly, or maybe a mockingjay. She doesn’t expect Bette to know what she means, she doesn’t even _know_ Bette, she’s spoken to her maybe three times, but the other girl just smiles at her.  
  
“I know,” she says, wrapping Artemis’s numb fingers around the pin. “That’s why you’re going to win.”  
  
  
02.  
  
“We should’ve tried that,” Wally drawls at the image screen in the penthouse suite from where he’s sprawled on the couch eating everything - _everything_ \- that the Avoxes keep bringing him.  
  
Artemis throws a fruit she’s never seen before at him, but he just catches it and bites into the purple-pink flesh. She’s had days to shake herself out of her stupor and it was time enough to remember why she avoids Wally like the plague at school - because he’s _annoying as shit_ and he’s an idiot. But he has a point.  
  
 _Everyone_ is talking about the two tributes from District 10. When the doe-eyed redhead and the tall, handsome boy with the jet-black hair had been called, they’d run to each other onstage and kissed like their lives depended on it. And judging by the coverage that kiss is getting, they just might. Artemis narrows her eyes at the screen, where the camera had zoomed in lasciviously on their mouths, close enough to see the gleam of wet lips and pink tongue and the girl’s lips shaping the words _I’m sorry_ over and over and over again. If it’s an act, it’s a damn good one. The part of Artemis that isn’t busy gagging at the thought of kissing Wally West almost wishes she’d thought of it first. Although maybe if Conner Kent was her fellow tribute, inspiration might have struck a little faster.  
  
“He’s not wrong,” Dinah sighs from the other side of the couch, blue eyes etched with deep circles from lack of sleep and old loss. “They’re all anyone’s talking about. Everyone will be rooting for them now, and they might just get some sponsors out of it.” Dinah got the nickname “the Black Canary” when she won her games, when Artemis was still small. Her arena had been an ice world, and  two fingers on each hand and most of her toes had gone white and then black with frostbite, which the Capitol had generously replaced for her after her victory. The nickname, the name plastered all over the image screens and on the fliers for her victory tour, had come about because she’d figured out, quite by chance, that if her voice hit a certain pitch, then the icicles that lined the roof of the cave she had hidden in would start to tremble and fall. She had gotten the remaining tributes (an alliance of Careers) to chase her into the cave and then screamed in precisely the right key. Some of them were neatly impaled by the massive icicles, and others had just been crushed by the weight of the fallen ice and snow.  
  
(She’d discovered the trick in the first place because of the way she’d screamed when the boy from her district had finally died of hypothermia, Oliver-someone, Artemis can’t remember precisely, and doesn’t want to.)  
  
Nobody calls Dinah the Black Canary in District 12.  
  
Later, after Wally has gone to sleep, stuffed to the gills, Artemis stays up to watch the other districts’ Reapings again. The glow from the screen lights up her hair in ghoulish greens and blues as they flash across her eyes: the boy and girl from District 5, both black-haired and blue-eyed and brave-looking; the boy from 4 with this warm brown skin and shockingly pale green eyes; the lovers from 10 again; the slight, smirking boy from 3; the blonde, hard-eyed twins from 2.  
  
“Do you remember your sister’s games?” Dinah’s voice startles out of her daze. She didn’t even know she was in the room. That’s bad. If she can be snuck up on, she’s dead. It’s that simple. If this happens two days from now, she’ll be dead and her mother will be alone.  
  
“Yeah,” she sighs, rubbing at her eyes, which feel gritty with strain. “But not as well as I should. I was just a kid then.”  
  
“You’re you’re a kid now,” Dinah says softly, voice hollow. “You’re all just kids. You’re always just kids.”  
  
Jade is the only victor Dinah’s ever trained. Jade had been charismatic and lethal and smart. And beautiful. Jade has always been beautiful. Jade has always been all these things, and so she was able to scrape together just enough sponsors to survive. Most tributes from the poorest district in the nation are not so blessed. Charm doesn’t come easy to coal miners or to starving children.  
  
“You remind me of her, you know.”  
  
“I’m nothing like Jade.” Her voice comes out hard, brittle. Jade makes people fall in love with her and Jade is ruthless and Jade is beautiful and Jade _left_. Artemis does not take after their father like Jade does. Artemis is proud of this fact.  
  
“...No,” Dinah’s voice comes after a long, long silence. “You’re better than she was. You’re a better person.” Another pause. “That’s why I’m worried for you.”  
  
“I can do what needs to be done,” Artemis growls behind clenched teeth, not thinking of Wally’s freckles or his runner’s legs or the way his one canine tooth grew in crooked.  
  
“Good. I just hope you can recognize what that is when the time comes.”  
  
Artemis falls asleep watching her own hand rise into the air, braided between pale, freckled fingers.  
  
  
03.  
  
Her interview is a disaster. She is curt and unforthcoming and she frowns. She can’t help it. She sees the crowd cheering for her in her glimmering dress and creamy blonde hair and something inside of her sparks into a rage so hot she has to grind her jaw shut so tight that only the most cursory answers can get out. The only person who gave a worse interview than her is Conner from District 10, one of the “star-crossed lovers” as everyone keeps calling them, who only gave yes/no answers and looked like he was about to strangle Caesar Flickerman the whole time.  
  
His partner (his girlfriend, she supposes), does beautifully, eyes always bright with joy and enthusiasm except when they were filled with tremulous, crystalline tears when asked about what would happen if it came down to just her and Conner. She doesn’t have an answer. The camera zooms in on the single, sparkling tear that caresses her cheek. It’s answer enough.  
  
Dick Grayson, “The Robin,” is charming and funny and clever and keeps making Caesar give a guffawing laugh with an apparently never-ending supply of puns. Kaldur’ahm from District 4 has an air of noble authority that gives him a gravitas that people are clearly responding to. Zatanna Zatara is charming and just sarcastic enough to be endearing and _poised_ in a way Artemis could never imitate in a thousand years. The other tribute from her district, Billy Batson, is the youngest tribute there, having just turned twelve the day before the reaping, and has a slight almost-lisp that makes him absolutely fucking adorable. Artemis feels sick. She feels sick right up until she gets onstage and she feels sick when she gets off, where Dinah is looking rueful and tired. Wally, of course, gives a great interview, cocky and funny and ribald, and because he looks like Wally West instead of Conner Kent, it comes off as fun, even tongue-in-cheek, instead of arrogant.  
  
The smile falls off his face as soon as he’s backstage. They don’t speak the rest of the evening.  
  
He stops her outside of her bathroom that night, her skin still stinging from how hard she’d scraped at her body until all the makeup and jewels and glitter had come off. Her hair hangs wet down to her waist.  
  
“Artemis,” he breathes, and there’s something that flashes across his face so fast she almost misses it before he grabs her elbow. “Tomorrow,” he starts, licking his lips and fidgeting. “Tomorrow, I’m gonna run in the opposite direction from you, okay? I don’t want it to come down to the two of us.”  
  
She wants to tell him that there is very, very little chance of that, but she recognizes this pact for what it is. And she finds she does not have the heart to take this last hope from him. He hesitates for just a moment and then in a sudden, jerky motion, leans over and presses dry lips against her cheek, near the corner of her mouth, so quickly. He runs away so fast he doesn’t even hear her exhale, breath trembling out of her mouth like a moth against a glass.  
  
  
04  
  
Most of them die in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, but she expected that. She sees Wally run for the trees, run so _fast_ she honestly believes for just a heartbeat that no one will ever catch him, _could_ ever catch him, that he’ll just run and run and run until he’s home and then keep running right into the wilds. The image sinks in her chest like a prayer as the blonde twins from 2, Tommy and Tuppence, the Terrors, kill three tributes before she even moves off her block. Their fists and knives and that _hammer_ gleam red in the sunlight and something about the glint of it makes her think of Jade’s knives so long ago and that’s the thought that startles her mind back into action and then she’s running for the trees.  (This arena is a jungle, she notes crazily, a jungle is like a forest, she can work with a forest.)  When she finally stops to breathe, the cannons overhead are barely audible over her blood pounding in her ears and she presses her hand hard over her ribs, shielding the image of Wally running from the cameras she knows are surrounding her. She watches the artificial sky and thinks _Not him._  
  
Thirteen images glow bright against the sky. Not one of them has red hair.  
  
  
05.  
  
She takes the bow the boy from 4’s body, Kaldur’ahm, handsome even with his green eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky. He’s lying next to the girl from his district - Tula, she wants to say - they’re both covered in blood and there’s no real way to know who killed who. Maybe they killed each other.  
  
 _Remember this,_ she orders herself, _This is a lesson._  
  
But two days later Wally quite literally runs into her, sending them both sprawling as Cameron, the boy from 1, bears down them, hurling throwing stars at them, eyes ice-blue and terrified. That’s what she remembers most, after she pulls her arrow from his chest so she can use it again, that he’d been as scared of Wally (of _Wally_ ) as Wally was of him, how he’d been crying as he chased him. She wipes the the arrow off on her pant leg and turns to face him. (She should never have turned her back on him in the first place, she chastises herself. Stupid.)  
  
He’s got a deep cut above on eye that looks like it’s maybe infected, and he’s just staring at her and waiting and _damn him_ making this her choice. She should just kill him now. She _should_. It’s what Jade would do, it’s what anyone with _sense_ would do, but she can still feel his fingers between hers, can feel his lips on her cheek, can feel her mother’s hand on her back and no.  
  
No.  
  
“We’ll last longer with two,” she finally mutters, pushing past his shoulder towards the river so that she doesn’t have to see if his face holds hope or resignation or -  
  
Or anything.  
  
  
06.  
  
They find Dick Grayson, the Robin, by the rubble of one of those strange silver columns that come along every few miles. He’s from District 3 - electronics, technology - and he must have known what he was doing up to a point. Maybe he did everything right and the gamemakers blew him up to stop him tampering with it. Either way, she thinks there’s no way he’s alive, not with that much blood, with that much of his body just... _gone_. But just as they’re about to search him for weapons, he makes a small sound like a scared animal, like a kitten, and _oh_. Oh, he must be in so much pain.  
  
Wally falls to his knees next to him at the sound, instantly, like he’s been called to prayer, and grabs hold of his hand. Artemis is slower, tearing her eyes away from what’s left of Dick’s torso to scan the area for attackers or an ambush.  
  
Dick grabs at her jacket, fisting his hand in the fabric, his eyes glassy with pain.  
  
“I was never gonna be him,” Dick Grayson croaks. Artemis has no one idea what it means, what he’s talking about, but she nods anyway, like she understands, brushes his hair back from his face. “I just wanted to make him -” a gurgle, and he spits up a mouthful of blood, “ - proud of me.” He chokes, blood bubbling up between his teeth.  
  
“He is,” Artemis assures him, desperate, a boulder lodged in her throat that keeps the sound from getting out right. _Why is she saying this? Why is she still here?_   “I know he is.  You did good, you did _so_ good, don’t worry.”  
  
Wally’s hand is tight around his, rubbing his shoulder helplessly.  
  
“Yeah?” Dick’s voice almost unrecognizable, but hopeful, a bit of the smirk working its way back into his face.  
  
“Yeah,” Wally assures him, because Artemis’s voice can’t get around that boulder, it’s choking her like the blood is choking Dick Grayson.  
  
He’s dead a second later, and the cannon sounds a million miles away.  
  
Wally arranges the body neatly, what they can find of it, while Artemis searches his utility belt for supplies.  
  
  
07.  
  
Zatanna is dead when they find her. At first they think she’s sleeping, and freeze, their eyes locking in a silent question of _Kill her or run away? Kill her or run away? Kill her or run away?_ when Wally jerks his chin at the bird pecking disinterestedly at her boot. Closer inspection reveals a purple-blue stain at the edges of her lips, and Artemis sees the nightlock in a discarded pile by her hand.  
  
“Then she didn’t feel anything,” Wally says at the same time Artemis pockets the berries and mutters, “We could use these.” Their heads jerk up in perfect unison at the sound of a branch breaking off to their left and Artemis fires off an arrow before she even consciously thinks to, before _enemy_ even works its way into her mind, her hands acting of their own accord.  
  
The blur at the edge of her vision suddenly crystallizes into a the shape of a boy, black-haired and blue-eyed and small, too small, oh no, oh _God_ -  
  
Wally runs so fast that he catches Billy Batson before he even hits the ground, but of course he’s already dead by then. Artemis has never been more grateful for her perfect aim, that he didn’t suffer. Artemis has never hated her perfection vision more, that she didn’t miss.  
  
Wally carefully, tenderly, pulls the arrow out of his tiny chest.  There’s barely any blood on it. That’s wrong, she think absently as Wally gently crosses the boy’s arms over his chest, there should be blood, there should be _proof_ , there should be blood all over her, so everyone can see what she’s done and run screaming from her, Wally should be _running_ -  
  
“Okay,” Wally finally sighs, straightening. “Let’s keep heading towards the river. I mean, we might as well - “ He breaks off when he sees her, hand clamped over her mouth like that day at the Reaping, and he touches her shoulder, just barely, like a question and suddenly she _lunges_ for him, wraps her arms around him so tight that her shoulders ache and cries into the soft hollow of his neck. His arms don’t hesitate, not even for a second, as they snake around her, pulling her as close as possible to him, and part of her hopes someone shoots them full of arrows _right_ now, just like this, so she never has to leave this moment, so she never has to be anywhere but in this boy’s arms, so her hands forget they ever learned how to shoot an arrow, how to throw a knife, how to make a fist, forget that they’re meant for anything but holding him.  
  
They stay like that until the sound of a mutt rushing through the underbrush sends them running for high ground.  
  
  
08.  
  
They run and don’t stop running until the sounds start to fade behind them. Wally is half-dragging her by now, they’ve been going for hours, and she’s gasping in every breath while he looks like he runs this everyday before breakfast.  Damn him.  
  
“Wally - stop - I can’t -” she finally rasps, just as they burst through the the dense vines into a clearing, the sun almost blinding in the steamy air.  
  
It’s hard to say who is more startled, them or the couple from District 10, Conner and Megan, the star-crossed lovers. Still alive and still together, Megan’s arm looped around Conner’s shoulder, stepping gingerly on one ankle that is visibly swollen. Conner drops her arms and shoves his body in front of her, but Wally’s already holding up his hands and backing away. She notices, distracted, that he’s mirroring the other boy, sneaking his body further and further in front of hers, but she’s so tired she can’t even make her arms grab an arrow out of her quiver. She’ll work up the energy to be mad at him later.  
  
“Look out!” she suddenly shouts, and she has no idea why she does, why she keeps trying to save the people who need her to die so that they can live, but it’s too late, just like it’s always been too late to save any of them. The knife handle blossoms in Megan’s chest like a grotesque flower.  She even looks beautiful when she’s dying, crimson blood sending out long, graceful tendrils across her shirt. She looks surprised more than anything and in the perfect stillness, Artemis can hear her whisper “ _Sorry_ ” just before her knees hit the ground, her fingers reaching for his even as she falls.  
  
Artemis can’t move, can’t do _anything_ except cling to Wally’s arm and watch as Conner, stubborn and disbelieving, holds her to his chest and wipes the blood from her mouth over and over and over again each time it trickles past her full lips, his hands more gentle than Artemis could ever have imagined for someone so fierce-looking. “No,” he mutters, sounding almost distracted, brushing back her bangs determinedly, “No, Megan, no, it’s okay, you’ll be fine, we can get a parachute, it’ll be fine, you’re fine, Megan, Megan, _please_. Please don’t leave me.”  
  
“This isn’t right,” she hears Wally whisper, almost to himself. “None of this is right.”  
  
The the Terror twins burst into the clearing, feral and grinning, and Tuppence twirls the knife in her hand, the twin of the one buried in Megan’s heart, and licks its edge. There is a beat of perfect stillness before Conner makes this _sound_ , a scream of such absolute rage that it doesn’t even sound _human_ and then he’s running at them, still screaming and maybe if the District 2 twins had known what they’d snap in Conner’s mind they wouldn’t have come to gloat over their kills, because they never stand a chance. Their identical eyes go wide for a just a second before Conner’s on top of them and then there is nothing but their screams, almost in a sick harmony to Conner’s own. Artemis knows they should be running, that she should be tugging Wally’s horrified gaze away from it and back into the trees, but she’s just like him, transfixed. She’s never seen anyone _torn apart_ like that, didn’t even know it was something human hands could do, but Conner has Tommy and _wrenches off his arm_ with a horrible, wet _tearing_ sound and Artemis can’t even move. It’s the mutts that finally break the spell, the familiar snuffling and howling precluding the sounds of tearing vines that snaps her into action and she yanks Wally’s hand towards her as she stumbles backwards into the brush. They’re wolves - _enormous_ wolves, wolves the size of horses - and Conner sees them coming and - and just goes still. Peaceful, even.  
  
The last thing Artemis sees before she starts running is Conner, kneeling on the ground next to Megan’s body, his eyes closed, waiting.  
  
  
09.  
  
They make it up onto one of the metal platforms before the wolf-mutts find them, and they spend an hour that lasts an eternity waiting for them to lose interest and lope off into the trees. Artemis finally stands up from where she’s been crouched next to Wally, her legs sore and her fingers cramping from keeping a tight grip on a notched arrow the whole time. Wally stays sitting for several minutes while she paces, legs dangling over the edge of the platform, staring at nothing.  At last, he stretches elaborately, popping his neck and each of his knuckles in turn, before joining her.  
  
She’s scanning the perimeter, so she doesn’t notice right away that he’s staring at her. That he’s staring at her like he did that night by her bathroom.  
  
“Wally?” He doesn’t say anything. “Wally, you’re making nervous. Say something.”  
  
“I just want you to know that it’s okay.”  
  
She frowns at him, still glancing back and forth between his sad, soft-eyed face and the trees.  
  
“What’s okay - Conner? Look, all that it - it’s done now and it’s four less people we have to worry about, so.”  
  
“Artemis.” His voice is soft, like he’s talking to a little kid, and it makes her want to smack him. “ _Artemis_ , look at me. They _were_ the last four. It’s just us now. I did the math while we were waiting. It’s just you and me. And it’s okay.”  
  
“No,” she snaps, shaking her head furiously, irritated more than anything, for getting her worked up like this over nothing. “No, you don’t know that. We couldn’t hear the cannons while we were running, you don’t _know_ -”  
  
“I’m good at math, Artemis. You know I am, we’re in the same classes. And I’ve been counting this whole time. That was twenty-two. I’ll make twenty-three. It’s okay.” He nods, just barely, down at her bow and she’s shocked to discover it’s still in her hands, that her hands could remember how to hold it when Wally is saying these things. And then she realizes _what_ he’s saying, and she drops it like it burns and it clatters to the metal surface under her feet. The arrow skitters off down the side, irretrievable.  
  
“No.” It’s all that keeps repeating around and around and around in her head. _No. No. No. Not you. Anyone but you._  
  
“Artemis.” He keeps saying her name like that, like he’s caressing it, like it’s beautiful, and she wants to run away from him as he slowly advances towards her, to protect him from her, from what he must have known was going to happen, how this was going to end.  
  
But she can’t move. And she wants him to touch her.  Suddenly, more than _anything_ , that is what she wants.  
  
“Artemis. You’ve got your mom. You’re all she’s got. My parents’ll be fine. We’ve got more money than most people in 12, you know we do. They’ll be fine. Your mom needs you.”  
  
“ _Your_ parents need you,” she snaps, and it doesn’t sound anything like her voice.  
  
“My parents love me,” Wally corrects her gently, and she watches his hand with morbid fascination as it reaches up to hesitantly stroke her blonde, blonde hair. “They don’t _need_ me.”  
  
“No,” she whispers, and it comes out like a very quiet wail, like she’s hurt, like she’s _dying_. “I should’ve killed you when I first saw you.” Her voice cracks around a sob she won’t let out. “When I first saw you in the woods. The second I stepped off that platform, I should’ve - “  
  
His mouth on hers cuts her off, and her hands are in his hair and his shirt, crushing him to her, where she’ll never, ever let him go, where they’ll just live in this jungle forever, until everyone turns off their screens, gets bored, forgets about them.  
  
“I used to watch you every day,” he breathes against her mouth, in between kisses. “I watched you in class, back when your hair was short, like your sister’s. I always got into more trouble in the classes I had with you,” he kisses her nose, her chin, her eyelids, “Because I was always trying to show off for you. I didn’t even care if I made you mad,” her jaw, her forehead, her temple, “Because if you were mad at me, then you were paying attention to me.”  
  
“Wally,” she breathes. That’s it. That’s all she has to say. Just his name forever and ever until they use up all each other’s air and then _nobody_ wins the 74th Annual Hunger Games. _I understand,_ she wants to tell Conner Kent from District 10, _I understand now._  
  
“Shh,” he whispers, cupping her face, running his thumbs over her cheeks, sliding his hands down her neck, her shoulders, her waist, before sliding back up to her face. He pulls back from her abruptly, eyes going saucer-wide at something behind her shoulder. She spins around, scrabbling for her bow, but there’s nothing there, there’s _nothing_ -  
  
She feels the brush of Wally’s lips against her cheek from behind her - not dry like before, but wet, wetter than it should be, viscous almost, and she touches her fingers to her cheek. They come back tinged purple.  
  
 _The berries._  
  
She slaps a hand to her pocket, her mind registering _empty_ , even as she spins around, just in time to see Wally smile at her apologetically, his lips stained the purple-blue of nightlock.  
  
  
10.  
  
She does not hear the cannon. She does not hear herself pronounced Victor.  
  
She does not hear anything for a long time.  
  
  
11.  
  
A year later, when Bette shows her a basket full of identical mockinjay pins, says _symbol_ , says _rebellion_ , Artemis touches her fingers to her cheek and says  
 _Yes._


End file.
